Sports fans are known for their large amount of informal knowledge about the outcomes of past sporting events. For an individual sports athlete, say a quarter back or a pitcher, fans may know what years the athlete played, what teams he played for, and what championship teams the athlete was a part of, as well as individual performance statistics particular to the sport, such as passing yards or touchdowns in football, earned run average, strikeouts, and home runs in baseball, and so forth. This knowledge is often acquired based on aggregations of information accrued by watching multiple seasons of play. In specific instances, a fan may know the outcome of specific plays within a game by a team or a given athlete. More generally, a fan's knowledge of the specific gameplay of an individual athlete will often be in the form of a general conception about how good an athlete is, with only a vague knowledge of specific events that form the baseline for that opinion. Demonstrating sports knowledge is also a common practice among sports fans.
Often sports fans will wager on the outcomes of the game or specific plays within the game. For examples, fans bet who will win or lose the game, or what the spread in the score will be at the end of the game between the winner or the loser. Fantasy football and baseball leagues are one example of how fans may test their knowledge. Participants in a fantasy league go through a virtual draft based on athletes from the actual league, and follow their hand-selected teams in order to try to amass the best performing team over the course of the season. Winning in a fantasy league is based on the outcome of presently occurring and soon to be occurring sports games during the current year's league play.